My video essay explores the ways in which three films of Larisa Shepitko remember the past. Wings (1966), The Homeland of Electricity (1967), and The Ascent (1977) create weather worlds – unstable, always-changing, dynamic.1 They invite the spectator to connect with history not only through language and plot but modes that are more embodied, situated, and multisensorial. Alongside the significant segments without dialogue, these films feature meteorological events and their consequences—rainstorms, heatwaves, winds, mist, whiteouts, fog—guiding us to a diegetic space where the prominence of dialogue and conventional narrative trajectories is diminished. They stage the past not as a carefully ordered narrative with a predetermined outcome but as an atmospherically alive environment that might encourage us to think about history as something that has elastic temporalities and thus possibilities, or what Ariella Azoulay has called “potential history”—not just what was, but what might have been.”2
The intersection of atmospheres and history by way of cinema’s material-affective affordances displaces the linear narrative of progress and draws attention to the disempowered communities that tended to occupy the edges of Soviet life. The images of peasants toiling and struggling to survive in a context that often rendered their realities invisible represent this dimension in my video essay. Although my piece does not make explicit the violence that had been inflicted upon these communities through radical state programs of industrialization, exile, wars, and famine, its echoes can be intuited in the juxtapositions of the rough physiognomy of landscapes and the weathered textures of faces and bodies.
By putting Shepitko’s work in conversation with some of the most iconic frames from Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s Zvenigora (1928) and Earth (1930), the video essay suggests that cinema has its own bank of memories. The filmmakers’ aesthetic and thematic sensibilities resonate loudly with one another. But instead of thinking about the resemblances in terms of influence, my video essay offers a space in which we can be attuned to the affective reverberations passing between these media objects. While they exist in a linear continuum of astronomical and biological time, these reverberations allow for a more flexible thinking about temporality. Films have memories of films. Dovzhenko’s and Shepitko’s characters look at each other, creating a site of imaginary encounter that carries a powerful affective charge. The new looking relations the video essay makes possible generate an atmosphere in which experiential temporalities overlap—Dovzhenko’s postrevolutionary tumult of the 1920s, Shepitko’s unstable 1960s, and the intervening years. This is an atmosphere of history, conjured by the means of cinema and remixed with the tools of the video essay. The images of the apples in the rain taken from Earth and inserted in the video’s audiovisual environment at once assumes the significance of the urtext to which Shepitko returns, and represents the nonlinear logic of historical time.3
There is another pair of eyes implicated in the looking relations. By interposing my physical presence in the flow of the film images, I foreground my position as a maker and a scholar, my distance from and my entanglement with these objects. Just as Shepitko’s films figure the past through cinema’s ability to engage the senses, I play with the material gestures, touch in particular, involved in traditional archival research and the process of making a video essay. In the onscreen text the use of the first-person pronouns underscores my personal relationship with these films—they address me rather than viewers in general. It is an acknowledgement that they have shaped a dimension of my identity and that I am no objective observer.
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This video essay would not have been possible without my time at the Embodying the Video Essay Workshop at Bowdoin College in the summer of 2023 and especially doing the exercises devised by Dayna McCleod.
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Endnotes
- The phrase “weather-world” comes from anthropologist Tim Ingold. See Tim Ingold, “Earth, Sky, Wind, and Weather,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13, no. 1 (2007): S19-S38.
- Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, “Memory in Liquid Time,” in Critical Memory Studies, ed. by Brett Ashley Kaplan (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), 112; Ariella Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (New York: Verso, 2019).
- The concept of historical time—the relationship between history and time—has been elaborated by Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
Viktoria Paranyuk